Real-world monetary price has traditionally been an issue faced by boxers, and sometimes argued as a limiting factor on its popularity.
The release of third-party tools such as EQWindow (which bypassed the client's limitations and allowed EverQuest to be run in a window), and the eventual addition of an in-built windowed mode for the game, greatly expanded the accessibility of boxing from a technical standpoint, enabling users to run two or more instances of the EQ game client on a single computer and quickly alt-tab (or click) between them. Since the earliest versions of the EQ client did not play nicely with alt-tabbing, lacked a windowed mode, and were fairly demanding on the hardware (and Internet services) widely available at the time, boxing was not convenient in EverQuest's early years, although two-boxing using two side-by-side computers (a common enough tactic among gaming couples and college friends) worked about as well as it ever has. Boxing has a long history in many MMORPGs, and EverQuest is no exception.
